Tbh I liked it at first but imo Rick is too much of an unlikable sociopath, Jerry is too pathetic, the show comes off as simultaneously too self-important and too mocking of its fans who overrate it.
Nonetheless it's overrated with absolutely autistic fans, and the whole sechzuan debacle, my God….
first of all, judging a work by its 'fanbase' or similar is absolutely cringe
now, richard and mortimer is a sitcom and thus its value is primarily derived, plain and simple, from the quality of its jokes which i'll posit is pretty high but ymmv ofc
rick is indeed an unlikable sociopath. BUT! he's an relatable unlikable sociopath. jerry is pathetic beyond description, sure, that's he's whole shtick. i'll point out, however, that every character in this show is defined by their various frailties with the possible exception of the younger generation, morty and summer
ok now i'm gonna go watch me some r&m, to be continued i guess
>>5412Indeed. I was pulled in initially, hoping it would take some quasi-Situationist turn but like you said Rick ended up being basically a Stirnerite agorist (the intergalactic black market episode where he hires the dude who "just loves killin'" (fucking liberalism, every time one thinks popular culture moved into a new territory there it is, just with new clothing (in this case existentialism))).
Morty is nothing but an emotional adolescent having trouble applying moral lessons to the cruel reality he keeps getting confronted with.
When they did all the pomo 90's
iRoNiC ads for mega-corporations I knew what I was holding out for was never going to arrive. That Harmon had read Chomsky once or something clearly didn't do all that much (and in retrospect oh what I naive sap
I was, believing the controlled opposition anarcho-radlib Chomsky has any real revolutionary effect on people! He's know for giving a critique of the
cultural dimension of capitalist society – nobody takes from his (supposed) anarcho-syndicalism).
>>5589>>5592Actually the problem with the dynamic between Jerry and everyone else is even worse than that. At first everyone except Rick is more or less normal. Over time Rick "converts" the family to his way of thinking: first Morty, then Summer, then Beth. Jerry is the only one who doesn't abandon his "stupid" values and accept Rick's vulgar nihilism. In spite of Jerry being described and portrayed as weak and pathetic most of the time, he's the only character who puts up serious resistance to Rick's manipulation and abuse, not just among the family but out of almost all the characters in the show.
A lot is made of the Rick/Morty relationship, but the Rick/Jerry relationship is a lot more revealing about the characters and the writers. There's a real Yin/Yang dynamic going on here. Rick is the Yin (masaculine, active, dominant) and Jerry the Yang (feminine, passive, submissive). They pull the family in two different directions and oscillate between extremes, but more or less exist in balance. And like the Yin/Yang symbol each one contains a piece of the other. For all his power, Rick has major vulnerabilities at his core that he sees reflected in Jerry to great irritation. At the same time Rick sees a bit of his power reflected in Jerry that allows Jerry to resist his control and maintain a separate identity. This dynamic is less about interpersonal relationships and more about internal conflict (mostly Dan Harmon's). How the two men interact with their family and the rest of the world shows how Harmon sees people's interactions.
Rick is always bent on "winning" and controlling every situation. He's obsessive and paranoid, and he has found a way to justify this behavior by actively involving himself in conflicts that require this mindset. Rather than try to change anything about himself, he tries to change the world to suit him. It's like the first line in The Departed - "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me." It's the logical conclusion of Will To Power, to become as God and transcend the world you live within. It's Rick's ultimate inability to ascend and his fallibility that create his massive insecurity and vulnerability. Because Rick is the ultimate Übermensch, he can't accept this vulnerability and takes every precaution to repress and hide it. For all his bluster, he's still quite limited because he can be bested by Jerry. It's the whole God vs Free Will thing. Sure, Rick could kill Jerry or use some pheromones to control him, but that's still "losing" because he's not
bending Jerry's will, just going around it. It's like a reality check that Harmon has when he meets someone who won't kiss his ass and call him a genius, no matter how hard he tries to impress them.
Jerry just wants to go along to get along. He's avoidant and skittish, but he does try to recognize and deal with his flaws. He knows he's no match for the universe or for other people so he's perfectly ok with compromising and meeting the needs of others. A deeply understated aspect of Jerry's character is an adaptability that rivals Rick's engineering skills. As much as the other characters take weirdness in stride, they tend to be detached from the shenanigans around them (opting to use superior force to get what they want) whereas Jerry learns the ropes and makes friends immediately, integrating into the situation instead of acting on it as an outsider. Jerry might settle for minimum effort, but in situations where minimum effort is high, he rises to the occasion (like the original Jerry in the Cronenberg universe). His method also tends to
work, which makes Rick hate him more. He can best be summed up by his own line, "I just kept crawling and it kept working." If Rick represents how Harmon sees himself at his best, as a master of his craft, Jerry represents Harmon where he is incompetent (especially in dealing with people). However, like Harmon or anybody else, Jerry has a spark of willpower, and like Harmon (but unlike many people) he holds onto it with a death grip so he can use it when he needs to.
The two tendencies are always fighting each other because the nature of each prevents them from ever reconciling. Rick won't accept defeat. Jerry won't push the issue the way he needs to. Maybe in real life Harmon could learn to integrate the positive aspects of both of these archetypes, but in the show they are contained in two separate characters. Morty and to a lesser degree Summer synthesize the two sides, but as long as Rick and Jerry are present in the show, the conflict will continue. Past a certain point it kind of becomes tedious and honestly I just lost interest in the show because the What Ifs were not that interesting and the character drama had played through pretty much all of its possibilities. In an alternate (socialist) universe the show might actually resolve/evolve the dynamic by giving these two characters major development, but in capitalism the show's brand is too fixed and the fanbase is too attached to the established characterization for challenging the audience like that to be allowed. Even if Harmon wanted to take it that direction, the producers would veto it because of muh bottom line, even though the show has already made them all rich(er). They all see themselves as Rick, master of the system but that's really much more a Jerry thing to be, because it's a closed system and they are bound to its rules, where Rick's whole thing is transcending a system and making it do what he wants.
>>5606>>5593Comparing a show like Rick and Morty to Looney Tunes is dumb. Looney Tunes is a series of slapstick shorts with only the faintest continuity (the characters' relationships are established and largely fixed). The point of Looney Tunes is to entertain with whimsical silliness based on animation being able to get away with things you couldn't in another medium. Rick and Morty (along with a lot of its contemporaries) is still very much a cartoon in that tradition, but it also uses continuity and integrates pathos and moralizing into its core conceit. Sure, there was that Looney Tunes opera short where Elmer Fudd kills Bugs and experiences profound grief, but that's isolated and done ironically to show the absurdity of the relationship they have. Rick and Morty's interactions change the characters over time, and the abusive nature of the relationship is played at times for comedy but just as often (usually simultaneously) as an earnest exploration of the dynamic. That's more of the nitty gritty mechanics, though. The main point and tl;dr is: shows like Rick & Morty aren't just trying to entertain you. They're also trying to be thought provoking or even edifying.
How successful they are is a completely separate question. The point is they aim for that, and Looney Tunes does not.
>>5292I liked the first season, but the second was so meh that I stopped watching it. Rick felt like an updated version of a drunken Homer Simpson, with that cynical Gen X humor (even though he's supposed to be smart.) So the first season felt like watching the Simpsons again, before the Simpsons stopped being funny.
I think that's why the show had so much appeal. I can't name any other current cartoons that fit the Sinpsons animated sitcom niche so closely.
>>9292H A V E S E X I N C E L
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>>5292It's the classic "hehe I'm so leftist but I will still cater to fash under the guise of plausible deniability"
It was good until season 3, then it was meh, and season 4 is unwatchable garbage
>>5589The Rick-Jerry dynamic is just Harmon's idealized self-image at war with his actual self-image
It's the curse of every kid who grew up 'smart' - believing himself to be the hyper-intelligent above-it-all ubermensch to cope with the fact that he's just a neurotic mess on the bottom of the social totem pole
A similar thing happened with Community
Jeff was originally a heavily idealized self-insert, but Abed ended up reflecting Harmon's true self-image (ie, the one constructed out of his lived experiences)
>>5604Holy shit sorry I just repeated your post with fewer words my man
I swear I didn't read it before I posted mine
Cool that someone else has a similar analysis tho
Just happened to tune in to see the episode tonight and hoo boy. le epic reddit moment: new episode of richard and mortimer goes full climate doomer
Morty's girl of the week is a captain planet parody, who is chained by capitalist greed, with her "kids" who summon her exploiting her for merchendise and appearance fees at conventions. So Morty kills them and frees her, but it turns out that she is a true believer environmentalist and capitalism forcing her to sell out was keeping her on a leash, so she starts doing eco-terrorism to try to fix global warming, including burning down a congressman's mansion (also the show unironically does a "muh coal jobs"). For some reason Morty has a problem with this (even though Rick causes planet-scale holocausts every time he farts) and decides to dump her, saying that if this is what it takes to save the earth maybe he'd rather just die.
Meanwhile in the B plot Summer and Rick are doing an apocalyptic bar crawl to take advantage of aliens having an emotional breakdown over their impending doom. Rick becomes attached to one of these aliens, and to prove to him that she just wants Rick to take her away from the planet exploding, Summer stops the next apocalyptic event from happening (and the alien leaves because now she's safe). The other aliens are mad at Summer for saving their planet because now they have to go to work tomorrow and live with the consequences of their actions.
This is the show now: calling you the bad guy if you are willing to do violence to stop an apocalypse, but then at the same time being ok with or even supportive of greater annihilation for its own sake. Basically, greater evilism.
>>17488That’s not really the point of the episode imo
Planetina is evil, and she is a liberal
The people she kills are all just innocent mine workers who genuinely have no choice if they want to survive
The system is broken as she said, but the solution she comes to is blaming and killing the people with the least power in the scenario
The “anything” solution she came up with wasn’t to kill the workers’ bosses who drove the system, but to kill the workers who were trapped by it
She is bad
>>17488>>17492 (me)
And to follow up, consider that the people Morty kills are all capitalists and managers, and this is not shown as a bad thing, terrifying but something that was necessary and done in self-defense and specifically to free their employee
>>17488>This is the show now: calling you the bad guy if you are willing to do violence to stop an apocalypse, but then at the same time being ok with or even supportive of greater annihilation for its own sake.like
>>17492 says, killing a bunch of random proles accomplishes nothing. you can look at planetina as a dig at the malthusian environmentalists, who cannot see that it is the mode of production that needs to change. that forces them to conclude that killing random people is fine because then there's fewer consumers and thus less production. you see this shit with XR too, who think that shutting down a mine for a day or two at the cost of activists spending decades in prison is somehow a workable strategy
the socialist solution to the climate crisis is of course to plan a transition to a greenhouse gas neutral economy globally
I don't think we can expect much of rick and morty because the show is so steeped in nihilism
>>17492>The people she kills are all just innocent mine workers who genuinely have no choice if they want to survive my dude it's a work of fiction
the people she kills are whoever the writers want them to be
they chose to make them "innocent workers" (who voted for more coal jobs instead of the same kind of work in green energy anyway) instead of the CEOs or something
>The “anything” solution she came up with wasn’t to kill the workers’ bosses who drove the system, but to kill the workers who were trapped by itShe did burn some congressman's mansion, though. They just chose to focus on muh workers to make her look bad. The same way media keeps doing with any vaguely left wing or revolutionary character. At first they seem nice but then they go and murder some innocents to turn the audience against them hoping the audience just associates the appealing parts of the character with senseless violence.
>>17493It wasn't shown to be necessary to kill the managers. If anything it's implied to be bad because it frees Planetina and she's a villain.
>>17498>you can look at planetina as a dig at the malthusian environmentalistsNo you can't. Literally nowhere does she do or say anything to suggest there are too many people or anything like that. Her actions are against people who are in the middle of causing the problem. You can talk about whether or not it's useful to attack fossil fuel workers, but it's not malthusian. They're not random people. They're part of the problem, even though they're a small part. And again, it's sloppy writing they liberals always do on topics like this where they show the plebs suffering because they want the lefty to be bad. For similar reasons, they won't show attacks against the system ever because they don't want people to get that idea. They don't criticize her for being too particular in her focus. They criticize her for taking drastic actions. Plenetina's ecoterrorism is contrasted with Morty just accepting the climate collapse.
>I don't think we can expect much of rick and morty because the show is so steeped in nihilismIt's not even nihilism though. It's hedonistic and indulgent in death drive.
>>18038Lots of people have thought about it before, anon.
But I came up with "Ricky Martin" in Spanish.
>>18082Yep. Justin Roiland doesn't even work on it technically, he's busier on his personal projects.
These latest seasons are all Dan Harmon and it shows.
>>5292Depends on who is writing it,
Jeff Loveness seems at least critical of capitalism.
Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland are fuck, tho.
vid related
>>19644> they suddenly remembered at the end they had some actual story to tellwell they also had some characters to establish that they could sell as merch
they even lampshade it in the planetina episode
I still watch it because I've been here since the pilot premiered and I want to see what happens to it, for better or worse. Plus I get a new season of content every year or so since I don't watch another TV shows still in production.
>>36237>Season 07 on approach, how do you think Justin's departure will affect the show (if at all)?Roiland hadn't written for the show since season 3, and the show became significantly more scripted over time, so Roiland's abscence won't be felt in the writing anymore than it is already. The voice acting on the other hand? Yeah, that could go sideways real easy. Season 7 was animated to lines recorded by Justin Roiland, and they're currently going through the dubbing process with the replacement(s), so the new voices can easily end up sounding more stilted and uncanny than they have to be. Take the stutters. I recently watched a clip from the German dub where Rick's VA replicated one of Justin Roiland's stutters and it sounded really unnatural. We also don't know yet if they insisted on one voice actor for both characters or went with two. Harder to find one person who can do spot-on impressions of both voices than two people who can do one each.
>And will there indeed be a showdown between with Evil Rick or was it yet another huge red herring?They're more openly committed to an overarching plot than they've ever been (not that it's saying much) and they still have 3 seasons to go per their contract after this one, so no, there won't be an epic, final showdown this early in the game. But they're definitely going to touch on that plot thread at least once though to keep up the illusion there's a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so many people have convinced themselves exists. I'm sort of one of them myself. The rational side of me knows the writing's too weak for the pay-offs to be good, but I still want to see how the show plays out, hoping for diamonds in the rough. If you've seen the episode titles, it's blatantly obvious #5 is going to be the token lore episode.
>>36288>Rick was on the level of an undefeatable god in Season 1Rick didn't become an epic, unbeatable, sci-fi demi-god until season 3. Rick was at his most fallible and underpowered in season 1. He gets like 2 unequivocal W's and the rest of it is him getting in way over his head and then getting away by the skin of his teeth, usually thanks to Morty's help. Season 2 is more of the same. He gets captured and sentenced to death by matriarchal aliens in one episode and his reaction at his own execution is pretty much "guess I'll die" until Summer comes up with a solution. Rick's fallibility is one reason why the first couple of seasons are universally more well-received than the later ones, even if most people can't articulate it.
>>36314>Is that just every show today? They're like "Hurr hurr its funny cause everyone sucks"Yeah.
>Is that funny though?Not really. The characters were probably nicer than they've ever been in season 6, but it was only a lateral move because the funnies did not increase.
By season 6, the writers are clearly maneuvering to make the show's central theme about how kindness and caring about things is not only the right thing to do, it'll make you happier and your life easier (or they're making that theme more prominent/consistent anyway). It's not a bad idea in my opinion, but I can't really say if it's good in practice until we see how it shakes out in season 7.
>>40402>The new guys are fine. You can tell the voices are different if you've watched this far and anyone who says you can't is a coping Redditor, but by the same token only seething Roilandcels would say they hurt the season. It's the writing.A lot of the content in the show (at least half the jokes) was Justin Roiland riffing in the recording booth. So in a sense it
is the new voice actors, or rather it's the gap left by removing the guy they're replacing. People forget that he's not just a voice actor. Him and Harmon were the creators/showrunners. It'd be like trying to do King of the Hill without Mike Judge.
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